Anyone who identifies as a woman is welcome here. You are welcome here as a writer, an artist, a dreamer, a culture-maker, a healer, an earth-shaker, someone who journals as a way to understand yourself, a curious heart...one who, voice trembling, still must speak...A woman singing the earth back to life.

Voice

One word to describe what we’ll be learning about together is “performance” of our writing, but what we’re really practicing is how to call forth our unfettered selves, our sovereign cells, from where they’ve been awaiting a voice. How to embody our deepest knowing, without apology, and to offer our creative voices in the spirit of a gift.

​The retreat will be a mix of guided visualization, writing, movement to express emotional energies, and ritual. In a supportive circle of sisters, you’ll discover the symbiotic relationship between your physical voice + body and your internal creative voice, how the two can nourish and reflect each other, and be offered as an elixir to our thirsty world.

​We can create art of staggering beauty, and yet, if we cannot roar with the pride of a lioness, we risk never reaching the ones who most need to hear our voices. On this half-day retreat at the Summer Solstice, we reclaim our sovereign feminine power as speakers of truth. As we move, breathe, and speak our writing together, we learn to embody what we've created with passion & authority, sourcing our confidence from the sun, moon, earth, and stars. Remembering we are made of this brilliance.

Through a journey with Isis, the Egyptian goddess of nature and magical re-membering, we restore inner authority over our own creative lives. We heal the inner critic and any dependence upon the approval of others. What shines forth is a newfound ability to preside over our gifts and to share these gifts generously: to discover a lavish inner-dominion in which our word is gold. And to enrich the lives of others as we confidently allow light to stream forth from our tender, divine lion-hearts.

About Opal: poet, teacher, and embodied performer

Opal blooms at the matrix between sacred longing and creative expression. She is passionate about empowering women to speak true words in gorgeous voices—and bringing forth the wild, the un-pretty, the secrets, shadows and splendor within all of our tender selves. She holds her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Minnesota, and spent several years teaching writing at the college level. Opal is also a yoga & meditation teacher (RYT-200), a radically vulnerable performer, and a healer who has studied women's spirituality, Lomi Lomi bodywork, reflexology, Reiki, and Peruvian shamanic rites. Opal's first collection of poetry, SURGE, is available from Tinderbox Editions. You can view a clip from her book launch performance here, and read more of her poetry & prose here.